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Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

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Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#21

Post by jlees »

It's just behavioural reinforcement. Upvote the positive but on the few occasions someone acts out of line with the spirit of the community, there's got to be a way to deal with them. Imagine a troll running rampant on HN with no downvoting; it'd be hard to get them to stop, since there is no consequence for their actions.

As it is, behaviour that acts out of the norm - lame jokes, empty-but-offensive remarks and entirely pointless trivia - all tends to be rewarded negatively, reinforcing the community values nicely. If you get downvoted, it's usually simple enough to figure out why - and if it really is a disagreement of opinion then the downvoters are doing it wrong, or there's also something about the way you express your opinion that is repellant.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#23

Post by chrischen »

tokenadult wrote: post #2

I cannot see how that is different than someone throwing a stone at another person just because they do not agree with them. You don't think there is any difference between throwing a rock at someone and reducing their overall vote count by one vote in an electronic voting system? If someone downvotes me, I have a reason to look again at what I posted and whether or not it fit the discussion. If someone throws a rock…

Both can be threatening. So certain types of comments that may be not accepted, but may not necessarily be wrong, have the risk of being censored by the mob via this social means. And so this risk in censorship by social degradation can be powerful enough to sway certain viewpoints from gaining traction here.

It may not happen all the time, but it certainly does happen. And since the "ranking algorithm" that is the voting can be achieved with just an up vote (at least in theory), I do believe the risks associated with a down vote outweigh any possible efficiency increase to the sorting algorithm.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#25

Post by pbhjpbhj »

robotrout wrote: post #12

"What if we knew who downvoted whom, what would be the result?" I love that idea, but extend it also to upvoting, and use it to create a killer social network and/or dating site. If you and I love the same ideas and hate the same ideas, than we should meet. We may not enrich each others worldview, but that's what HN is for. You and I, in such a scenario would probably get along really well and be great friends. A gre…

Then we would care [a little?] more about the person commenting and less about the content of the comments. Perhaps content would still win but people would be influenced with decisions like "he downvoted me" or "she believes Y" (where Y is orthogonal to the issue) or dimiss salient point based on past arguments.

Which is fine if that's what you're after.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#27

Post by wtallis »

chrischen wrote: post #18
bendotc wrote: post #5

I always find opinions like these to be illuminating whenever people claim that people don't care about karma, as it's obviously just a silly number in some computer running this website. As it turns out, some people find losing just 1 point to be indistinguishable from throwing a rock at the person. For what it's worth, the downvote is for the comment, not the poster. It influences a sorting algorithm that shapes th…

Even if you do not care about karma, a down vote is still symbol of negativity, just as is someone who doesn't care about earthly possessions being robbed. The sorting algorithm can probably work fine with just an upvote button. I don't think you really help sort comments when you down-vote if you personally think the person is wrong. You should reply and correct them if they are wrong. Comments that aren't wrong and…

If people only down-vote fairly (ie. to suppress a comment that contains a factual error that has been explained by another comment) then the net effect of allowing down-votes is to give users relatively more influence over the ranking of posts. The issue of whether to allow down-votes ultimately is a trade-off between stronger and faster filtering of comments, and fewer opportunities for abuse.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#28

Post by fnid »

warp wrote: post #4

Most people, I believe, downvote because they do not agree with someone's opinion. If they do, they're doing it wrong. Downvote someone for not contributing to the discussion.

One of the problems is that people don't down vote for the same reasons. Some down because they disagree, others to resort topics, others because they don't like the person's comment, tone, bias, etc...

Without a consistent use of the down vote, the effect is undesired by most.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#29

Post by aichcon »

jlees wrote: post #21

It's just behavioural reinforcement. Upvote the positive but on the few occasions someone acts out of line with the spirit of the community, there's got to be a way to deal with them. Imagine a troll running rampant on HN with no downvoting; it'd be hard to get them to stop, since there is no consequence for their actions. As it is, behaviour that acts out of the norm - lame jokes, empty-but-offensive remarks and ent…

I agree that it enforces the spirit of the community. One of my first comments was a joke and it was down-modded hard (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=684509). This quickly taught me the community's expectations in terms of quality of comments.

Re: Ask HN: Why downvote? I honestly do not get it.

#30

Post by viraptor »

chrischen wrote: post #18
bendotc wrote: post #5

I always find opinions like these to be illuminating whenever people claim that people don't care about karma, as it's obviously just a silly number in some computer running this website. As it turns out, some people find losing just 1 point to be indistinguishable from throwing a rock at the person. For what it's worth, the downvote is for the comment, not the poster. It influences a sorting algorithm that shapes th…

Even if you do not care about karma, a down vote is still symbol of negativity, just as is someone who doesn't care about earthly possessions being robbed. The sorting algorithm can probably work fine with just an upvote button. I don't think you really help sort comments when you down-vote if you personally think the person is wrong. You should reply and correct them if they are wrong. Comments that aren't wrong and…

So what action do you propose for a situation where some person writes an incorrect post and is then corrected, but the whole thread doesn't deserve to be upvoted?

If you just upvote the correction, you mark it as significant in some way. But if it's only correcting a flamebait, why would you? It seems to be better to leave the correction there (so that people who read it get more information), but force the whole thread to go down by downvoting the first incorrect post. I think it's a good protection against flamewars which may contain a lot of "correct" posts, but you may want to push them down anyways.

The problem of course is: what is correct / true and how sure are you about it.

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